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James Casto
, October 07, 2012
(view all comments by James Casto)
For 30 years,John Billheimer was vice president of a small consulting firm specializing in transportation planning. But in recent years he’s also made a name for himself as a writer of whodunits.
Billheimer, a West Virginia native who now lives in Californ ia, says he had never written anything but articles for technical journals before the writing bug bit him and he started taking creative writing courses at night.
A business trip back to West Virginia to work on a railroad project set him to thinking about trying his hand at a novel set in his native state. The result was “The Contrary Blues,” published in 1998, the first of what would become a series of mysteries featuring Owen Allison, a California engineering consultant who finds himself drawn back to his native West Virginia. (The resemblance between Allison and Billheimer seems far from coincidental.)
Billheimer is a huge baseball fan and in 2007 published a non-fiction book on baseball scapegoats, “Baseball and the Blame Game.” Given his passion for the game, it seems inevitable that sooner or later he would write a baseball mystery and that’s what he’s come up with in “Field of Schemes.”
The novel introduces a new character, Lloyd Keaton, a newspaper sportswriter who lost his money, his wife and his big-city sportswriting job to a gambling habit. It’s set in the fictitious small town of Menckenburg, Ohio, with side trips to the gambling establishments of East Wheeling, W.Va.
When a hotshot outfielder on Menckenburg’s minor league team asks his trainer, Dale Loren, for steroids, Loren supplies the player a harmless mixture of cold cream and lemon juice, telling him it’s a brand new steroid that can’t be detected by baseball’s urine-testing regimen. Believing he has an illegal edge, the player goes on a hitting spree and is called up to the majors where, cut off from his supply of “steroids,” he falls into a deep slump. Then he tests positive for drugs and fingers Loren as his supplier. Loren is fired and, not long after, the outfielder is found dead.
The police say the outfielder was the victim of a fatal drug overdose. But sportswriter Keaton is unconvinced and sets out to clear trainer Loren’s name. In the process, he’s threatened by mobsters, shot at and learns that his own teenage son is hooked on steroids. But, just like Owen Allison in Billheimer’s earlier series of mysteries, Keaton soon manages to make things right.
Billheimer has already completed writing a second baseball mystery featuring Keaton, “A Player To Be Maimed Later,” and anticipates it will be published next year.
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